So far, we have covered what a webpage is and how it can be created,
how it is provided to website visitors, and the ways and means of
making a website available to the world. In summary, the cheapest,
quickest and easiest way is to pay a small monthly or annual fee to a
webhoster to provide and maintain the facilities required, get hold of
a webpage editor, create your webpages and upload (transfer) them to
your webhost account. But besides simply offering a certain amount of
storage for website files and the technical configuration to make them
work as a website, webhosters usually offer a wide range of other
facilities.
There are two basic areas – behind-the-scenes facilities and website
functionality facilities. While some of these extras may require
additional fees, many do not.
Considering the behind-the-scenes freebies first. Email is a common
extra, giving the ability to set up multiple specific mailboxes (ie.
email accounts), customised to your domain name eg.
,
You may also be able to
set up auto-reply email accounts, forwarding email accounts, and
anti-spam protection may be provided.
Another possible extra is a range of statistics, automatically
collected, analysed, and presented in a webpage report. Several
different statistics packages may be available, providing different
views on who has visited, when, from where, and how long. Useful if you
are serious about building traffic to your website.
You may be able to set up FTP accounts, to give others the ability to
save files to your website. You could take a backup of your website for
safe storage on your own computer. You could do clever things with
redirection (send certain addresses eg. somewhere.com.vu/shop to
completely different websites). And you could protect certain areas of
your website with passwords.
On the website functionality side of things, you could add a guestbook
for visitors to leave comments, add a search facility to your website,
add a shopping cart, a chat area, a clock or a visitor counter.
Generally, you'll need to know a bit about website programming and
advanced webpage editing to include these facilities, but at least they
save 90% of the hard work if you want their functionality.
But the best is yet to come. What if you wanted a complete pre-built
website, ready-to-use within seconds, that didn't need any webpage
editor or uploading/downloading at all? What if you wanted to choose
from a wide range of packages eg. community websites, e-commerce
websites, real estate websites, each designed specifically for its
purpose? And what if you wanted them for free? More next week...
